


Everything the Water Sees (The Yellow Brick Road Remix)

by the_rck



Category: Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen
Genre: Amegakure, Business Travel, Gen, Movie Making, Silver Queen's Dreaming of Sunshine Universe, Worldbuilding, mentoring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-06-02 23:48:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19452025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/pseuds/the_rck
Summary: The border guard handed each of us an enameled blue token big enough that I'd need the thumbs and index fingers from both hands to circle the disk. Each came on a fibrous cord long enough to go around a person's neck. "Don't lose them," she told us.





	Everything the Water Sees (The Yellow Brick Road Remix)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my beta readers. I'll name them specifically after reveals.

The border guard handed each of us an enameled blue token big enough that I'd need the thumbs and index fingers from both hands to circle the disk. Each came on a fibrous cord long enough to go around a person's neck. "Don't lose them," she told us.

I put mine on immediately. The disk rested in the middle of my chest, about where a standard press pass would. It was heavier than I'd expected but still bounced when I walked. I considered tucking it under my shirt to limit that, but I hesitated. The tiny and interlocking white lines threading the surface of the disk probably identified me as clearly as a press pass would. There were differences in the patterns on each one I could see, a lot of similarities, too, but each was probably unique.

That seemed like a terribly complicated thing to do and to maintain, but it probably told the watching ninja exactly where it was every moment. There might even be something to set off an alarm if I took it off for too long. I'd want that for wrangling a film crew if it was a thing I could do. I had to rely on lists and schedules and experience.

"What happens if we do?" Director Makino, asked, flashing a smile. He didn't quite have movie star looks, but he tended to assume that his smile would get him anything he wanted from at least three quarters of the women he met. Sometimes, it even worked.

I wouldn't have tried it on any sort of ninja, let alone an Ame border guard, but for Makino Daisuke physical safety never outweighed Art. It also never mattered much next to the question of how many tickets a movie would sell.

And his name and his charm had gotten us this far. I'd have bet against a film crew being allowed into Rain Country. We wouldn't visit the Hidden Village; at least, I hoped not. If we did, it would likely mean we weren't going to leave again.

The border guard looked unimpressed. "If your disk heats up or vibrates or starts to glow, you're getting near a place you shouldn't be." She sounded a little bored. "Try to stay together. If you lose anybody, let the commander of your escort know immediately. We're not responsible for what happens if someone wanders off." She eyed the equipment we were carrying. "Photography in designated areas only."

Director Makino pulled out the most impressive looking of our letters of permission and waved it at the border guard. "We're expected," he said.

The border guard looked like she was only just holding back from rolling her eyes. "That's why you're getting in at all." She frowned as if to emphasize that we were taking a big risk by crossing the borders.

Oddly, she didn't seem to think that she and her people were taking any sort of risk by letting us in.

I knew that the Director had offered walk-on roles in trade for potential filming locations. He'd reached out to Princess Fuun fans until he'd found someone with the right connections to get us in. Everyone in the production company had practice in turning a foot in the door into an all access pass. The Director was a past master of that particular art.

I wasn't nearly as good at it, but that had never been my function. The Director made the movies. I made sure that no one starved and that nothing was lost as we moved from location to location. I supervised the measurements and the contracts and the budget for replacing equipment on the road, all of the details that might shatter the Director's artistic vision.

It wasn't a terrible job. I got to travel a lot and see a lot of places that none of my brothers ever would. All I had to do was to pay attention and, later, much later, drop a report of what I'd seen and heard with one of Kaede obaa-san's certified Teachers of Accounting. I wasn't a spy, not exactly. I had no idea where those reports went or who read them.

Probably no one did. And I'd like to sell you some prime farm land in Wind Country.

Though I've heard rumors that that's no longer as bad an investment as it used to be. Maybe.

I just went wherever I went and reported what I noticed. I didn't go out of my way, I didn't pry, and I didn't-- couldn't-- use chakra. I just paid attention and let most people ignore me.

I wasn't a spy. Not being a spy decreased the risk of me being arrested as a spy or simply murdered as potentially one. As an unmarried woman with no particular job title or flamboyance, I'd gotten more invisible as I aged. Everyone looked at Director Makino and at the actors.

None of the rest of us tried to upstage them.

Visually, I was there to fill a hole in the backdrop, to balance the composition. Anybody competent could have filled my physical space. 'Competent' was a much rarer quality than most people thought it was.

Except that we were going into Rain Country. Nobody 'just happened to go' there. People-- even ninja-- who crossed the border without passing through one of the metal archways and getting a token returned broken and either silenced or raving, or they never came back at all.

Most of the merchants I knew who traded with Rain referred to the place, in whispers, as 'the Land of Hungry Mouths.' Most people assumed that that referred to the refugees who'd disappeared into the downpour, but I'd asked. The merchants meant that the land devoured the unwary and the unwise. They thought that the country itself swallowed trespassers, no human intervention needed, and most of them thought that the loss of profits that came from trading at the border was a small price for not having to risk going inside.

I didn't want to go through the arch. The people I'd talked to weren't afraid of Ame ninja, not any more than they were of ninja from other places. They feared the land itself.

"At least, the border's easy to see," one of my grandfather's friends had told me. He'd spat toward the left side of the road after saying it. "If the sun's out. Don't go that way if it's raining, Emiko-chan, or you'll step into something you'll never get out of. As long as you've still got something on this side, it's not worth it."

I intended to be very careful not to lose my enameled disk.

****

In spite of the name, I hadn't expected constant rain, not everywhere, but here we were. If we were careful and quick, our cameras would work for a while out of doors. They just wouldn't stand up to the hours we needed in order to do the job properly. I'd gotten tarps-- purchased locally-- rigged over the vulnerable bits, but it wasn't stopping all of the wind driven droplets or protecting against the humidity and mist.

We had another scriptwriter working on a draft that put as many scenes as possible indoors. We could still shoot some of them in Rain Country, just to get the promised walk-ons in the can, and we definitely wanted the landscape because we couldn't replicate it without looking incredibly fake.

Kind of like the ninja fights in the last Princess Fuun movie. We couldn't have done that with wires and angles and lighting. We could do a lot that way, but not that and not this.

Rain Country had corners and edges, places where one turn or step sideways changed the lighting and the color saturation. Sometimes, in some places, the rain glowed, glimmers of purple or yellow in the air. Every time it started, our escorts pulled up their rebreathers and moved us along the way that ninja in Suna would have if a sandstorm was coming. 

The Director shouted and complained about it until he got a faceful of the purple and spent three hours hallucinating. He said that the imagery had been inspiring and would be useful for his next film, but he never risked a repeat.

The yellow seemed to be valuable. When it fell, civilians put out special buckets to catch it. I think they distilled it somehow to concentrate the non-water bits. I heard six different stories about what it did. I think the one about it being a potent stimulant was most likely.

Functioning rebreathers were valuable in the local black markets. I could have traded all of our cameras and only gotten two. 

Ninja and other people in valued occupations had government issued rebreathers. All permanent structures had doors and windows that could be sealed against the wrong sorts of rain. There were a lot more permanent structures than I'd expected in a land known for starving refugees.

Of course, we saw more signs of illness and of old, permanent injuries than we did of starvation. Even the ninja had to be careful about footrot and fevers.

We had a little retinue of actor wannabes, too, not as many as I'd expected-- usually we had dozens of people hanging around and hoping to catch the Director's eye-- but there were some. One of the boys showed me scarring on his shoulder and said that it came from the orange rain. That, he told me, was acidic, and he'd made the mistake of wearing a cheap, imported shirt that couldn't handle it.

Local fabrics cost a bit more and tended to be raw rather than dyed. The fiber came from a water plant that I'd never seen anywhere else. Most of the plants in Rain were things I hadn't seen anywhere else. I suppose that that was a big factor in Rain having goods my grandfather's friends would come to trade for. Rain lacked a lot of things that people needed, but they had things that no one else could offer.

I was surprised to see that all of the civilians we met also wore those enameled disks. The ninja didn't, but the civilians did. Nagi, the boy who'd shown me his scars told me that the disks identified 'safe paths.' I thought, at first, that he just meant that those were the paths the ninja wouldn't kill people for using, but he told me that qualifying for the ninja academy in Amekagure required stepping three times into the Paths of Death, once for the light, once for the warmth, and once for the thunder. Only those who managed all three without injury were accepted.

He claimed that even a grandmother could attempt the test. He also claimed that his cousin's best friend had passed simply by following a cat. "They just know!" he insisted. "Cats know all the paths and all the exits. If I'd found a cat, I'd be a ninja, too!"

I didn't see any cats the whole time we were in Rain Country. I saw a lot of small creatures I couldn't identify and a handful of equally strange larger ones but not a single cat.

I'm pretty sure that Nagi hoped that I could be his cat to lead him out of Rain. He wasn't following me around because I was pretty or because he really thought I could make him a movie star. He thought that I had pull and that I might be flattered by someone young and apparently admiring. He just-- The one path he desperately wanted was one that led to a future. 

I don't know if I could have been his cat, not the way he wanted me to be. If we'd been anywhere else, the Director would certainly have indulged me if I'd asked him to offer Nagi a permanent job as my apprentice. I was useful, and the Director actually did know how much he needed me. His company could easily find work for six more like me, and I'd taken apprentices before.

Nagi certainly knew a lot of things about life in Rain. He was smart enough to put pieces together, and he'd pegged me as the member of the company least likely to demand things he didn't want to give and most likely to be able to pull strings to give him a job outside of Rain.

I didn't offer because I didn't think that the border guards would let Nagi leave with us, not unless he was a spy. If I asked and he was refused exit with us, he'd have to hope that he was only watched. He might be imprisoned or killed or refused any chance to work.

But, most likely, they'd have kept him and taken his blue disk. Then it would only be a matter of time before he stepped into a place he couldn't get out of. A lot of crimes were punished that way.

Also, if I'd asked, especially if I asked the Director to pull strings, I'd be risking drawing suspicion on myself. I might not be allowed to leave, either, or I might leave Rain and then disappear because Iwa had heard a rumor that I was a spy. Or Suna had. Or Konoha.

It happened to people who traveled a lot, even those who were entirely innocent. I don't think the Director would have noticed the risk. He might have said yes, so I didn't ask.

Instead, I taught Nagi everything he could learn in a very rapid apprenticeship. He already had the paying attention to important details part down. "There are jobs you can get, good ones, just not necessarily ones involving... travel," I told him the first time I sat him down to discuss the logistics of who would carry what on the next leg of our journey. "Even the ninja here need people who plan for the mundane crap like broken axles and forgotten toothbrushes. You'll never starve, and you'll meet a lot of interesting people."

He met my eyes then turned so that his face was hidden for a few moments. He understood that I wasn't offering a job with me, and he didn't want me to see that it hurt. He was so young, probably not older than twenty.

"It's a different kind of work," I said. "It'll last longer than being pretty and pay more reliably than crime. It won't break your hands like working nettles or your back like hauling supplies." I sighed. "Wherever your family came from, there's nothing to go back to. Whatever's there, someone else has claimed it."

He nodded, and a lot of the innocence he'd been wearing dropped away. He was still who and what he had been, but he wasn't hiding the edges of fear and grief any more. He looked more real than he had before.

"If you can act that well," I said, "you might be able to make it in pictures. You just can't do it through me. Get yourself a waterproof camera and someone to hold it. No reason movies from Rain couldn't go over big." I didn't believe he would because I also didn't think that he wanted fame or art or anything else that wasn't tangible. Making great art required a passion for it that neither of us had. "I can't teach those skills."

"I just want to see what's around all the corners."

I believed that part because I recognized the hunger for it. Nagi's parents had come to Rain to escape famine and bloodshed; now Nagi wanted more. "Director Makino has almost died six times in the last two weeks. One of the cameramen--" Toga had died; his partner would live, but she wasn't responding to outside stimuli. Most of the rest of us had become very, very careful about watching our disks. "You don't want to die, Nagi-kun, or you'd be looking around corners anyway."

While we worked together on the logistics of managing the crew and Director Makino, I told him stories about places he'd never see and ways I'd thought we all might die. The dangers in Rain were different from those outside; they weren't actually worse, not for people who knew them. For one thing, there weren't nearly as many bandits.

Nagi told me stories, too, mostly things he'd heard third or fourth hand. He taught me about how to tell which bits of ground were solid in spite of the constant rain. He also told me why we were forbidden to leave shelter when the rain wasn't falling. He didn't think it was a secret, but none of the ninja who kept us strictly indoors when the air wasn't wet had ever explained, not even when the Director shouted about missing the light.

Nagi told me that, in Rain, there was more danger when it didn't rain because the disks stopped working. Falling water separated the human world from the shadows of deaths and might-have-beens and possibilities. Without the rain, anyone-- or anything-- might miss the path and stumble from one world to another. When civilians called their hidden village 'Rain,' it was as much a prayer as a name.

When the rain ceased to fall, it meant that the gods had turned their faces away. They did that, occasionally, just so that no one forgot that they could.

Foreign ninja, Nagi told me, misunderstood the dangers in Rain. They assumed the monsters and nightmare landscapes they blundered into were deliberate and defensive, genjutsu of some terrifying sort. It was only that none of them wanted to sleep in a land where they were not the most terrible thing that might happen. 

Nagi respected Ame ninja and envied them. He had a very low opinion of ninja from anywhere else. I told him about the ninja I'd met in other places and about the times they'd been useful and the times they hadn't. Some of them were people I'd have been willing to share a meal with again. Few of them were people I'd have trusted to care for a goldfish.

Not unless I was paying them really well to do it.

Nagi whispered, once, that the tattered walls of reality in Rain came from blood shed with intention and from wars that slammed chakra, repeatedly, against the surrounding world. There was, he told me, a point when reality scarred instead of healing fully. The scars pulled boundaries askew so that things touched that were never meant to. The rest of the world might go the same way if Rain ever opened its borders, if the gods turned away entirely.

He believed that, and, of all the things he told me, it was the one thing he considered dangerous to know.

We spent twice as long in Rain as we'd expected to, almost four months. Only a little of that-- no more than a week-- was due to me wanting to be sure that I'd taught Nagi enough. Usually, I had a year or more. There was a lot for him to learn, and he wouldn't be able to ask me later.

I wrote Nagi a letter of reference the last day we were there. I don't know what happened to him after I crossed the border back into the normal world. It was weird to feel safe in sunlight and scary not to have an indicator to warn which steps I took risked one of the Paths of Death. 

Writing to ask Nagi how he was doing won't ever be safe for either of us. Instead, I adopted a cat and named it after him. I'd have preferred a dog, but Nagi had wanted a cat.

If I ever had to go back to Rain, I'd feel safer with a cat.

I dropped off my report for Kaede obaa-san three weeks after I handed my enameled disk back to the border guard as we left Rain Country. I don't know that anything came of it. I never let myself look at that part of things.

I couldn't be a spy if I thought like one.


End file.
